The future of finance: Innovation underpins success 

Future‑readiness is no longer confined to payments or pure‑play banking. Financial institutions that demonstrate agility and reinvent the way they operate, reinvigorate their processes, and invest in AI to stay ahead of the pack now lead in a continually evolving financial services landscape 

• Payments networks rule the podium: Asset‑light, API‑driven business models keep Mastercard and Visa nimble; both scored very high on Business Diversity and Innovation Outcomes thanks to embedded finance partnerships and venture incubators
• Digital pure‑plays leapfrog legacy peers: Coinbase moves into the top five because tokenized‑asset custody now counts toward both growth expectations and innovation yield – two factors where many universal banks lag 
• Asian trailblazers emphasize culture and cloud: DBS’s early cloud‑native pivot and “hackathon” talent culture boost its R&D and ESG‑talent sub‑scores, lifting it above larger Western banks with heftier balance sheets but slower cultural velocity 
• Insurance giants show split performance: Progressive leads the insurer pack for the first time due to its investments in AI. Zurich and Allianz crack the top 10 by coupling balance‑sheet strength with climate‑adjusted underwriting, while US multiline carriers sit mid‑table as long‑tail liabilities and low digital engagement drag on investor sentiment 
• Regulatory adaptability is a silent differentiator: Firms that stood up modular compliance stacks for DORA, CSRD, and MiCAR scored higher on Cash & Debt (fewer fines) and Innovation Outcomes (faster product releases in regulated sandboxes) 

Seven trends shaping the finance industry

The financial services industry in 2025 stands at a pivotal juncture. Seven key trends have emerged that are impacting how financial institutions operate and compete.  Across these trends, a common thread emerges: agility – strategic, technological, operational, and cultural – is key to staying future-ready.  

• An unsettled macro backdrop: Inflation is receding and interest rates are trending downward after recent peaks, yet economic growth remains subdued and uncertainty high. Geopolitical tensions – from wars and sanctions to trade disputes – continue to test the resilience of global financial networks.  

• AI moves from pilot to pervasive and increasing governance is emerging: AI is now embedded across the value chain and regulators and boards have now pivoted from “innovation‑friendly” to “show me the controls”.  

• Cloud, tokenization, and open finance redefine the digital agenda: Financial institutions that architect for composability – decoupling data, business logic, and channels – gain the agility to plug into partner ecosystems or launch white-label services in weeks rather than quarters. 

• Regulation fragments and tightens: Future‑ready firms invest in “compliance agility” as 2025 ushers in the most complex patchwork of financial rules in decades. Winning organizations build modular, reusable control frameworks, automate evidence gathering, and maintain “policy intelligence” capabilities that fuse legal analysis with geopolitical risk sensing.  

• The customer imperative: hyper‑personal, always‑on, privacy‑respectful: Digital leaders have reset expectations: customers want frictionless journeys that remember context across channels. Institutions that square the “personalization‑privacy paradox” will convert trust into durable economics: higher cross‑sell, lower churn, and richer data flow to power the next wave of AI. 

• ESG integration evolving from marketing slogans to regulated baseline: Mandatory sustainability reporting hits a tipping point in 2025. Skepticism about the ESG label is rising in some jurisdictions, so framing sustainability through the lens of financial material risk and growth is crucial. 
• Talent: bridging the skills chasm while perfecting hybrid work: AI engineers, cyber specialists, data scientists, and sustainability analysts are topping recruitment wishlists while unemployment for these roles is near record lows. Salary inflation continues even as broader labor markets cool and demand for flexibility, purpose, and continuous upskilling persists.
  
  

The future-ready titans forging the path ahead

Mastercard and DBS are the top performers in the 2025 Finance Indicator. Mastercard leads the indicator followed by Asian banking giant DBS in second place. In sixth place is insurer Progressive, highlighting how future‑readiness is no longer confined to payments or pure‑play banking. 

Mastercard leads the indicator in position 1. It has spent the last decade rewiring itself for “infinite optionality” as CEO Michael Miebach turned a venerable card network into a boundaryless operating system for the digital economy. Every element of Mastercard’s old four‑party payment rail has been broken into bite‑sized, public APIs. This enables developers across the globe to pull fraud‑AI, tokenization, open‑banking pipes, or real‑time account rails quickly. This modularity allows the company to pivot faster than before: a joint venture now clears domestic transactions in China even as the same platform powers peer‑to‑peer payments in Ghana and B2B invoice flows in Germany. Its investment in a $7bn cyber‑and‑identity firewall has transformed the brand that once just moved money, it now sells trust, data, and resilience at a planetary scale – still hitting “five‑nines” uptime while inventing rails, that no spreadsheet has yet modeled. Infinite optionality, it turns out, is a very profitable business model. 

DBS is in second place having reached the same summit by choosing the long road. In 2014, CEO Piyush Gupta looked at Alibaba’s branchless juggernaut and ordered a house‑wide spring‑clean at DBS. Hundreds of legacy processes were shredded in week‑long Process Improvement Events, where frontline staff earned the right to rewrite workflows on whiteboards and have them signed off before lunch on Friday. Money was ringfenced to rip out brittle cores and rebuild them into clean, lean, API‑ready processes. Only when the ‘wiring’ was safe did DBS layer on cloud microservices and open APIs, turning DBS into the world’s most admired digital bank. The payoff is visible everywhere: sub‑second account openings, AI nudges that help customers save, new products rolling out across six markets in weeks, not quarters underpinned by a culture where a junior coder can fix a policy that once took a regional committee to amend. Slow work made DBS very fast. 

These two champions prove that future readiness is not a single playbook but a shared mindset. Mastercard wins by expanding the value chain into an ecosystem anyone can plug into, DBS wins by compressing internal complexity until change itself becomes routine. Mastercard scales by offering the world a modular, LEGO-style set of payments, whereas DBS turns its own house into a flexible, fault‑tolerant machine. Both, however, pair audacious technology with disciplined governance, invest as heavily in trust as in code, and treat every regulatory jolt as design input rather than drag. In uncertain times, the leaders’ message is clear: build platforms that welcome future possibility, build cores that can absorb future shock, and you won’t just survive the next discontinuity – you’ll define it. 

Progressive is the top insurer on the indicator, achieving an impressive sixth place. The 86‑year‑old firm vaulted into the top tier by turning actuarial science into a real‑time sensing network. Long before “telematics” became a buzzword, Progressive gambled on fitting cars with Snapshot devices and ingesting billions of miles of driving data. By 2024 that legacy had matured into an AI factory that prices risk hour‑by‑hour and flags accidents in milliseconds. Last year the company scaled its edge and launched an accident response feature in its mobile app, which auto‑detects serious crashes and dispatches help to the scene; a nationwide rollout was announced in November 2024. Progressive’s results in 2024 showed how well their market responded; more than five million net new policies and 21% premium growth were achieved. CEO Tricia Griffith acknowledged the excellent results commenting in the Progressive Corporation 2024 Annual Report Letter to Shareholders that this may have been “one of the best overall years in the history of Progressive.”

How is future readiness measured?

Our Future Readiness Indicator is designed to measure a company’s readiness for deep, long-term, secular trends. We use a rule-based methodology to arrive at a composite score for each company, enabling us to identify industry leaders. We can then investigate the behaviors and attitudes of specific companies. 

The Future Readiness Indicator assesses a company’s preparedness for the future through a comprehensive methodology. This includes evaluating key factors: Financial Fundamentals, Investor’s Expectations of Future Growth, Business Diversity, Employee Diversity/ESG, Research & Development, Early Results of Innovation, and Cash & Debt. The methodology uses publicly available data, including company websites, annual metric reports, business models, press releases, and third-party sources like CrunchBase, Espacenet, and Sustainalytics. The ranking is based on these factors and aims to provide a holistic roadmap of a company’s position and potential for future success. For more detail on how we develop the Future Readiness Indicator, please visit our Research Methodology page.